Unstrung Heros

We all have our heroes. Artists and writers especially need heroes like others need drugs, food or money. Hero's inspire us to create. Without them we're hollow empty shells. We're just going through the motions. Anyway, my Sweet Baboo, Anderson H. Cooper had left town 2 weeks before and still hadn’t emailed me. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty low on that breezy Friday June 23rd when bon vivant, raconteur and all around man about town Vittorio J. Carli called to cheer me up.
“Would you like to go to a birthday party?” Sure I said. I even called my fellow blogger Deep H to come crash the party with us.
On the way west down Division Street Vito told me that the party was for Shaggy’s girlfriend Ellen. Ellen is an old friend of mine so it turned out I wouldn’t be crashing after all. Over the years I had lost touch with Ellen until we just this last winter ran into each other at Vito’s birthday party at the Skylark in Pilsen.
Ellen is a prolific and talented artist with a rather gloomy sense of humor. She showed me a model Shrimp boat she had made from tongue depressors she had appropriated from her mom who is a paramedic. It looked eerily similar to hurricane dislocated boat I appropriated from CNN for a cartoon of AC360º. Ellen made her boat without any diagram using only her imagination.
She shares her most unusual apartment with a remarkable young man, Matthew (Matt) Marsden. The outside of the building looks like an old church rectory. Inside it is a veritable museum. Every inch of interior is covered in meticulously ordered found objects. While we were hanging out in the bathroom, Deep H discovered a bottle of 100 year old liver pills carefully ensconced in a curio cabinet. Above are pictured some examples of what we catalogued.
Ellen tends to live inside her imagination. She doesn’t always notice everything around her. I told her that I especially loved the artificial leg that was employed as an end table in the living room. She didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Her roommate Matt was the interior decorator and she was too overwhelmed to remember everything. Although, when the going gets tough her sense of humor takes over. I reached into her refrigerator to get a cold beer. Its interior felt warmer than the kitchen. I was struggling to close and seal the door. I told her, “I don’t want your food to spoil.” Her gloomy laughter kicked in. She quipped, “Too late for that…”